Not sure if this ought to go into the YM or Digital subforum because it's a bit of both. I've started work on a 7-channel sound routine that uses DMA audio to play 3 channels of 256-byte wavetable data with variable pitch and 1-channel of fixed-pitch full-size samples (for drums and that) alongside 3 channels of YM notes inc. noise. Aim is to have a sort of PC Engine or Konami SCC chip sound to it, should end up using around the same CPU use as .mod replay but the memory footprint is a lot smaller, also it uses none of the timers. More to do but thought I'd stick up what I've got going so far - .mp3 and .tos executable attached (Bit of a crap test pattern but it serves its purpose for now. Press Space when finished to do... absolutely nothing! You'll need to reboot)

I spotted the Arkos stuff as I was working on this and wondered the same! Haven't checked it out yet but it would be cool to use it, at the moment I'm coping with creating pattern data as blocks of dc.b but that's going to be a pain before too long and I'm not savouring the thought of having to write an editor just yet.

Cheers guys! Looking forward to hearing what it's capable of in the hands of the talented Atari chip musicians Wouldn't imagine it's an easy case of dropping support for additional channels into existing editors so I'll need to spin one of my own at some point.

I had the feeling would be possible to have something rather cheap on 2 channels : 1 for wavetable, 1 for drum- use looping DMA buffer set with the length of the transposed wave- fill the other channel non stop with a dma looping interupt (for drum)

You're right, wavetable stuff is pretty fascinating. The way I'm mixing is with the usual approach of writing 500 double-buffered bytes and switching/restarting DMA per VBL, using a scale table for the tuned channels and incrementally stepping through the PCM data for the drums. Going with the approach that the NEC and Konami chips use, they have a 32 step wavetable. I repeat a 32 step waveform throughout 256 bytes, initially as a cheap way of avoiding having to mask off a step counter during mixing at the expense of some memory, but I then realised I could use the extra space to get some effects like PWM for free. I'm also interested in seeing if I can get some "true" wavetable synthesis (as per the PPG Wave synth) by switching waveforms mid-read, if that makes any sense!

You might know Stella Polaris from a couple of STe demos; It was first used in "..do things" in 1999, in form of a three channel DMA-synth. Then used as a pure YM2149 version in the reset demo of "Madness" later that year. Both demos by Cream.